John Lydus is not a highly-ranked author by any standard. Michael
Maas calls him, with justice, "a disgruntled civil servant and
antiquarian" of the first half of the sixth century, which was
dominated by the emperor Justinian whose rule contemporaries counted
from 518, when his uncle Justin donned the purple. He came from the city
of Philadelphia, which went back no further than the Hellenistic period,
but it was in the territory of the ancient Lydian empire, which had
fallen a thousand years before his time. But John had an
antiquarian's interest in Lydia and knew at least one word of
Lydian, which was a dead language in his day. Lydus perhaps had some
claim to be called "the Lydian."

His On the Magistracies is extant in three books and has been well
mined as a source for the bureaucracy of Late Antiquity. We also have
his De Ostentis (On Portents) and a work on the calendar, the De
Mensibus. He also wrote poetry, at least two panegyrics, including one
on Justinian which pleased the emperor, and a history of the Persian War
up to the "Endless Peace" of 532, which was commissioned by
Justinian himself. None of that has survived. He became moderately
well-to-do; a fellow Philadelphian who held the praetorian prefecture secured him a salaried post in his office as a shorthand secretary and
the influence-peddling which that made possible proved lucrative.
Eventually Justinian appointed him to a professorship at the imperial
school in Constantinople. Yet he was a disappointed man.

He is a splendid witness of his own segment of Justinian's
period, and Maas exploits him well in this brilliant little book, which
is as much about the intellectual climate of Justinian's age as it
is about Lydus. For his attitude to the Roman past, Maas compares him
with Zosimus, also a bureaucrat in Constantinople, though almost a
generation earlier. Their outlooks were closely similar, but Zosimus was
openly a pagan. Lydus was not. He did not attack Christianity and was
eager to praise Justinian, who was more efficient and ruthless at
rooting out paganism than any of his predecessors. But Lydus's
model for decline was that of Zosimus; the difference was that Lydus
left the pagan gods and the Christian theological disputes out of it.

Maas begins with background. Justinian's reign was a period of
transition and Maas's first chapter is a valuable summary. His
third chapter takes up the theme again. The slogan for Justinian's
programme was restoration, but Procopius of Caesarea had it right in his
Secret History. Justinian was an innovator. Like the res publica
restituta of Augustus, the restored imperium of Justinian mixed old,
traditional ingredients, but what emerged was something new and
different.

The fifth chapter, "Paganism and Politics" is one of the
most valuable. Paganism was a way of life, closely bound up with
educational and cultural traditions with which Late Antiquity did not
want to break. Public sacrifices mere only a part of it.
Justinian's anti-paganism had a touch of McCarthyism about it. Maas
calls it Justinian's "intolerant little game" (p. 77),
and argues instead for "an uneasy cultural ground of common
interests, values and education" which pagan and Christian shared,
and it was antiquarianism which provided "a key to the middle
ground between Christianity and paganism." But this can be said
only of a tiny, educated elite. Christianity had conquered the urban
masses, and with the help of the monks and holy men, it was mell on the
way to conquering the countryside as well. The "middle ground"
was growing sharply smaller in Lydus's lifetime.

This is a book of sound scholarship and good judgement. It adds
measurably to our understanding of the Weltanschauung of Constantinople
in the first half of the sixth century.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Canadian Journal of History
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